Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

Uncomfortably, I’m wondering where this is going. He continues. “This is a different culture, yes, but I do not want to think of you this way.”

“Hmmm.” As he wraps the sheet around me, I’ve got one eye on my pile of clothes and the other on the exit. “When I was young, there was a woman I wanted to marry, but my family wouldn’t allow it.”

“Did you marry her?”

“No, she was my heart, but I did not disrespect my family. I never violated her, so she could marry another. But we did share delicious nights,” he sighs. “Something about you reminds me of her.”

He drapes the sheet over the back of my head, like a raincoat, the top covering my head and hair, and draping over every inch of skin. No ankles show in my makeshift djellaba. He pulls me near.

“Tonight, you make love like a Moroccan virgin.”

First it’s the knees. I bend them and lie on my side, as instructed, and with hotel lotion so runny it’s almost water, he lubricates himself and pushes in and out of the crevice created at the joint. He moans in pleasure. Then Ali aligns my arm to my side and holds it firmly against my body as his cock shuttles in and out of the hollow space of my armpit. He works his way clockwise around my figure, taking a pit stop in my mouth, until he hits six o’clock, and then he hesitates and inserts himself between the thickest part of my thighs and, just as I feel my legs beginning to sting from the rubbing and agitation, I force myself to stay still, as he’s in his own private Moroccan lair, fucking on his virgin, excited by the technicalities of social law, the bending of rules and of skin, the Berber and French and Spanish and Bedouin blood that crosses in her, and when it’s all over and he’s sheepish, he reaches into his suitcase and slides 24-karat gold bangles up my arm. I keep waiting, expectantly. For something. But then I’m granted clarity. A Moroccan woman’s virginity is more than protecting the sacred few inches of real estate that no man but her husband may explore. Virginity to Ali and his kind is about a man’s insecurities over a woman’s gratification. To know no other man has brought this woman to orgasm—that’s the certified definition of virginity. It’s not about physical territory as much as emotional, as he doesn’t want to look in his wife’s eyes and wonder if someone else was more skillful in granting her pleasure. He wants to know she could never compare and contrast.

Ali’s virgin was no virgin; she’d certainly been violated. But not pleasured, the poor girl. Perhaps my own international relations are the spiritual commiseration with women under draconian sexual law. For the only pleasure Ali will give me is leaving on the morning plane. That, and the gold on my arms, which will fetch enough to help pay for more weeks of living and looking.

T he guajiro copsare birddoggin’ me,” laughed Limón. Nervously. “People really do say that, in your country? I’m starting to suspect it’s all mierda.Because the slang you teach, well—it’s a funny thing. None of my yumasseem to know what I’m saying.”

“Perhaps they’re not the hippest of yumas,” I suggested, suppressing a giggle.

“Told my yumathat another girl was flirting, you know, giving me the hairy eyeball,” he said. “ Coñoif she didn’t think I was crazy.”

“Someone gave you the hairy eyeball?” I asked, fluttering my eyelashes and clicking my tongue. I thought about my grandfather, who suspected until his final day that most women fancied him.

Limón laughed and I laughed, and I remember laughing because it was the last time Limón and I shared a giggle. In fact, it would be among the last handful of words we’d ever exchange.

But I didn’t know that then.

What I knew was that Limón—in an unsolicited confession—swore an adherence to heterosexuality despite my protests, my saying that it was none of my business. That his sexuality, like everyone’s, I was learning, was impossible to define and wasn’t immutable. Like all of our thoughts, urges, and beliefs, our sexuality is up for grabs right until our last heartbeat.

But Limón didn’t hear. In Cuba, he explained indignantly, pingueros—gay male prostitutes and, literally, pingaslooking for pingas—are permitted to retain their machismo in a sexual encounter with another male under a few conditions. Those being that they are the bugarrónbut not the maricón;the giver of pleasure, but not the receiver; the top, but never the bottom. Yet the truth of the conversation was bigger than Limón admitted. In these desperate times, even the guardedly macho are venturing into humiliating acts of homosexuality, as foreigners on the hunt for attractive hombresprovided an irresistible demand to be filled by those not normally gay.

Limón quickly changed the subject to the one I was dying to discuss: news on my family’s whereabouts.

“The woman I met with in Miramar knows your old cook. She worked for your mother the whole time she was in Havana,” he whispered, triumphant but cautious, as most Cubans believed their landlines to be tapped. “She hinted she knew José Antonio.”

“You have an address?” My voice was calm, but my brain had exploded. I couldn’t wait to tell Susie how right she had been.

“Let’s meet at Colón cemetery in four hours.”

When I hung up, I felt happier than I could ever remember.

TO ENDURE THE wait, I slip into the nearest movie house, the Charles Chaplin. A new local film, Suite Havana,has been released, and I get the last free seat. The audience is restless, and as the film opens, it becomes apparent it’s without dialogue. The camera follows ordinary Cubans through their lives. It lingers on faces as they eat a tired meal of rice and beans. Hospital workers double as transvestites in a tourist show. A doctor dons a clown suit and unhappily entertains children for a few extra pesos. The Cubans are shown grim and fettered as they “resolve” their way through their lives.

As the movie ends, few eyes are dry, and the crowd applauds gravely.

Even in the dark, there is no escaping the light.

THE YEAR IS 1901 and a woman dies in the act of childbirth. Her baby is stillborn. With its tiny corpse between her thighs, to symbolize death at birth, the woman is entombed at Colón cemetery in Havana. Over the years, her husband faithfully visits the grave, and in doing so he devises a ritual and adheres to it determinedly. First, he knocks on one of the tombstone’s four brass rings to announce his arrival. Second, he places flowers on the tomb. And third, he walks backward until the headstone is out of view, careful not to turn on the grave of his beloved, out of respect.

Several years later, her corpse is exhumed. To the astonishment of the gravediggers, the woman’s flesh is intact, and the baby has found its way into the cradle of her arms.

In the wake of this revelation, the woman attains the stature of a deity and becomes known as La Milagrosa—the miraculous one. For the next hundred years people make a pilgrimage to her grave, believing her to be the granter of miracles and a protector of mothers and children.

I’m standing in line with flowers for La Milagrosa, awaiting my own try at a request for deliverance. An answered prayer from a saint who looks after wayward children.

It’s nearly my turn. I watch as people knock on her grave, leave flowers, and pray for their own personal miracle. Like her husband, the seekers leave walking backward, never turning away from the tomb of the granter of gifts.

A young boy nudges me. I’m up. Slowly, I knock at La Milagrosa’s tombstone and, kneeling, place flowers at the mother’s grave. Silently I whisper the name of my father, José Antonio, and plead for direction in the wilderness of this vast city. I slip a small map at the base of her tomb, in case she needs to consult the streets for preciseness.